The first thing you do is talk to them about why. Don’t bombard them with doom and gloom scenarios—make it fun. In discussing why with my children, we talked about everything from weather, asteroids, zombies, pirates and more stuff than I can remember.

So I guess you save the conversation about having to eat the family dog until that option is really on the table (no pun intended). Makes sense.

Zermoid, regarding my “killing, cooking, and eating the unborn children of chickens,” I’m far from a vegetarian, but I draw the line at my family pets! LOL! … However, my adult son has adopted the policy of “no fur or feathers.” That was annoying enough until I was at a restaurant with him recently and his policy had moved up to including no calamari, because calamari are of the octopus family and those creatures (according to him) are “sentient creatures.”

His new plan has him moving to San Francisco, where he can live in the land of fruits and nuts and other people who think his “logic” makes sense. Me? I won’t eat the family pet, but I learned as a young kid that farm yard chickens were picturesque and Bossie the cow was nice to pat, but they were there for eating. But I draw the line at family pets!

I don’t know what the heck this has to do with the RKBA, and Sebastian may tire of paying for the bandwidth for this drivel.

Since we’re on the subject of eating dogs: I’m reminded of the first person to reach the South Pole. One of the things he did, was to eat one of the dogs on his dog sleigh every so often, and feed that dog to the others as well. He did this so that he could reduce the supplies he had to carry, and to stretch them as well. (As his supplies reduced, he didn’t need as many dogs to pull the sleigh.)

I can’t remember if this was from a PBS special about the ill-fated expedition to the South Pole that claimed that everyone basically died from depression (there was a second person who made it shortly afterward, but didn’t make it back); or if it was the PBS special that explained how the second person wasn’t depressed, so much as they were hit by an unusually bad snow storm, and the captain had broken his ankle, and the other two members of the team who were still with him didn’t want to leave him behind.